Issues with the hero’s “When hurt” event

[Marby]

Yesterday I played TManSan’s newest game. The hero there was able to say “Ouch…”. I wondered how TManSan managed that and had a closer look at the hero in my own test game. It seems I’ve missed a very important feature. Finally! The hero finally has got an “When hurt” event! Congratulations! I was so happy to see it. Now, we will be able to create a whole bunch of exciting new stuff and can even handle a game over by ourselves!

While testing that fantastic new event I found out the following issues with it. I report on them below to help get rid of these quickly:

• Health bar updates too late
  I found out that the health bar is updated only after the event. Within the event, however, the correct number of HP can already be checked with “if hero health value…”. This is of course confusing and also took me some time to understand how the event actually works.
• Screenplay update requires restarting the game
  Unlike usual, you have to restart the game before the engine accepts changed screenplay in the “When hurt” event.
• HP of the hero can be negative
  It took me a little while to realize that the engine does not prevent HP from being set below 0. HP should not be negative, because this is really confusing. After all, there is no such thing as deader than dead.

@deWiTTERS:
Nevertheless, thank you for finally implementing also the “When hurt” event for the hero. It will serve us all well.

[deWiTTERS]

1. When getting hurt, the user actions will be the first one to be run with the new health value. This is to be able to set some health when it drops under 0. If it wouldn’t run first, you could not do this. So you can prevent an actor from dying. This also means of course that all other components are not aware of the new health yet, until the custom actions end.
2. That is weird, I have to take a look at that!https://trello.com/c/wgGpSHfH
3. Some RPG’s use negative health to be unconscious, and when you drop below a certain negative value, you are permanently dead. This would mean you could still revive a dead character. Also, when the hero drops below 0, you might have an item that gives +50 health or something. Then it’s also necessary to know how much the hero got hurt extra to the one that killed.

[Marby]

1.
However, that means also the following:
Imagine a boss, who is invincible the first time the hero meets him and also is so powerful, that he will kill the hero instantly with just one blast. If we let our hero say his last words like: “I… I will revenge my friends… anyway. You… you’ll see!” then a full health bar will appear to be very odd! Therefore, I suggest to make at least the redraw of the health bar independant from the rest of the processing and update it always right after HP changes.

3.
I didn’t know this is intended. If I think about it, we indeed could use this information for creating a special health handling ourselves. However, it is very important to know, that HP can be negative! You should state that somewhere officially on your help pages. If after a resurrection the hero should have e. g. 10 HP, it is important for us to use an assignment instead of an increasing health value command.

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